Neftalí made other new friends that summer. The Parodi family had made their money by using their sawmill to process the virgin forests around Puerto Saavedra into timber. Their home, in which they lived year-round, was a hub for social gatherings among the rich and influential families who came to summer in the increasingly fashionable seaside community. No one needed an invitation; the town was small enough that everyone knew when the gatherings would be. Sometimes they would read poetry or have intellectual discussions about society or art. Neftalí would show up and take in the flow of ideas as he sat off in a corner.
He was surprised and struck by the “black and sudden eyes” of the Parodis’ youngest daughter, Maria. They exchanged little pieces of paper, folded up so as to disappear in the hand. Neruda would write what would be the nineteenth poem in Twenty Love Poems for her.
Girl morena and agile, the sun that grows the fruits
that plumps the grains, that twists the seaweed
made your joyous body, your luminous eyes
and your mouth that has the smile of water.
A black and eager sun is braided into the strands
of your black mane, when you stretch your arms.
You play with the sun like with a little creek
and it leaves two dark pools in your eyes.
In Puerto Saavedra, Neftalí also began a great friendship with Augusto Winter, widely considered to be Chile’s first ecological poet. His venerability was accented by his beautiful beard, which cascaded like the stacks of bookshelves along the walls of his library, a tiny room in his house crammed with books from floor to ceiling. Winter had the best library Neruda ever knew. He so loved literature and wanted to share his passion with others that he simply lent his books to everyone. On his first visit, Neftalí was immediately drawn to books by Jules Verne and the Italian adventure and science fiction author Emilio Salgari. There was a sawdust-burning stove in the center of the room, and he would settle himself next to it as if he were “condemned to read in the three summer months all the books that were written through the long winters of the world.” “Have you read this one yet?” Winter would ask, passing him one of Pierre Alexis Ponson du Terrail’s nineteenth-century adventure novels, starring the intrepid hero Rocambole. Or perhaps Winter would press on him Vargas Vila’s latest novel, Ante los bárbaros: Los Estados Unidos y la guerra (In the Face of the Savages: The United States and the War), in which the radical Colombian writer denounced the United States for its imperialism in the Spanish-American War. Whatever book Neftalí was reading, this library by the sea was a sanctuary where he found new ideas and myths, which would inflame his imagination and richly inform his writing.
Neftalí spent plenty of time exploring the local wilderness in Puerto Saavedra, including the sublime green shores of the expansive Lake Budi, often stippled with swans (as long as no one was hunting them). He might sit on the hillside above Señor Pacheco’s second house, where he was staying, and watch the light blue ocean pulse its universal heartbeat for hours. From that slope, he could pivot from watching the waves hit the beach to an overhead view of the river meeting the sea, as he first did upon his arrival, miniature boats like toys in the distance. He rode his horse through rolling fields, sometimes daring into the limits of the Mapuche lands. Or he headed down to town, near Winter’s library, and walked to where the river met the sea, sand dunes sloped smooth, small to huge. Riding his horse on the beach, he could lose himself in the backdrop of deep green pines, which complemented the colors of sand and sea. Neruda once noted in an interview that in his twenties, when home alone composing, he couldn’t write without seriously thinking of the sound of Temuco’s rain and the waves crashing on the sand of Puerto Saavedra.
At the end of summer, Neftalí would leave Winter and his library, the relaxed time spent with Teresa in the open air, and all the other wonders of the coast. He dreaded the start of another anxiety-provoking school year. But in 1920 Neftalí found a fascinating new teacher who would become another essential mentor for him, opening up new literary worlds while inspiring his writing and intellect. The poet Gabriela Mistral had left her teaching post in Punta Arenas, at the southern tip of Patagonia, and moved to Temuco to head its girls’ liceo. Twenty-five years later she would become the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. When she arrived in Temuco, at the age of thirty-one, she was already one of the country’s best-known poets. Mistral’s “Sonetos de la muerte” (“Sonnets of Death”) had won first place in the most important national poetry competition in Santiago in 1914. Neftalí was thrilled that a poet of her stature had come to Temuco.
Shortly after her arrival in town, he dressed himself in a white collared shirt, black vest, and black cloth pants, and knocked on the door to her house, hoping that she would read some of his poetry. A young artist, just nineteen, answered the door. She was Laura Rodig Pizarro, who had met Mistral in Punta Arenas and became her assistant, while Rodig herself developed into a nationally acclaimed activist painter and sculptor. Neftalí wasn’t the only one in Temuco who had called on Mistral; many other writers, intellectuals, and pseudo-intellectuals wanted the attention and blessing of such an accomplished poet living in the isolation of the frontier. Rodig told Neftalí that Mistral wasn’t in, so Neftalí waited for three hours, saying nothing. Finally, saddened, he walked back home, poetry in hand. But he returned the
